


deep, dim soul of a star

by oriflamme



Series: robots. robots everywhere [9]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Coma, Cultural Speculation, Dub Con Mind Melds, Dubious Consent, F/M, Mental Disintegration, Merging With Titans and Other Extreme Sports, Possession, Till All Are One spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 18:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11213838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: Windblade, interfacing with Caminus, Metroplex, Navitas, and Vigilem (and Starscream).





	deep, dim soul of a star

**Author's Note:**

> Hover over Latin phrases for a translation. Late Till All Are One spoilers abound.
> 
> Edit 7/5/17 heheheh...(TAAO 11 spoilers) Vigil!Windblade is canon, I feel so alive

Merging is a last resort. Always, always, always.

Interfacing with the immense mind of a Titan feels something akin to funneling an ocean into a single bottle - the bottle being one's own processor. Rather than interpreting the ancient glyphs and dancing readouts and maintenance lights that a dormant Titan projects from its processor, you're drowned in a deluge of data sung on a scale that thrums lower and deeper than anyone but a Titan could ever sing. The glimmering glyphs hammer through one's mind with physical force, blazing like stars, shining notes of light that scorch through the circuits of one's processor like coruscating _flame_. A single vast thought from a Titan requires more processing power that any single Camien possesses.

It doesn't burn. It floods through, and lights up every circuit you never knew you had. Firewalls and medical partitions and encryptions mean nothing; the Titan's vast mind rolls them under in a wave, and without safeguards, you're completely subsumed. 

It's not impossible for a random Camien off the street to unspool their own interface cords and plug into one of Caminus's scattered hubs. They burn out so quickly that they're usually found still smoking, their wires melted into tacky slag along the inside of their armor and their energon sizzling away into the air with a too-sweet smell. Among stranger sects of the Way of Flame, the experience is rumored to be transcendental. For those who are not cityspeakers, keyboards and computer monitors are safer.

Windblade practices exactly once. Cityspeakers must understand what a merge feels like, so that they are prepared in the event that they have no other choice. After they ensconce the augmented, handcrafted port in her helm and she installs the throttler programs and shunts and dampener hardware designed to ensure she can never open her whole mind wide, voluntarily or otherwise, her mentors escort her to the furthest edge of Caminus's disassembled network. The city of Kapnos bloomed around this far hub back in brighter days, before the light of Caminus's star dimmed to perpetual twilight and the seeds of energon ore planted deep within the planet upon the Titan's arrival failed to crystallize as predicted.  Most of the planet's population migrated closer together as the energy crisis worsened, and while many of the scattered fragments of Caminus have been called home, this far-flung auxiliary core remains isolated specifically for this purpose. Once located in Caminus's right hip, this processor cluster is less refined than his true mind, back in the capital - but still a piece of the whole, however distant the connection.

Now, she just has to survive.

This is her final test. Windblade does not intend to fail. If she does, she'll be relegated to little more than an aide who assists the cityspeakers by fetching and carrying and perhaps, in the event of an emergency, helping them to translate the flickering, layered galaxy of readouts that swirl over Caminus's central processor into something simple enough for them to act upon.  Or - not necessarily worse - she could melt herself, if the dampeners fail. It happens, rarely. Cityspeaker novices are tested extensively before selection to ensure compatibility with both Caminus and with the modifications needed to stem the flood of data before it reaches their mind, but it only takes a single misplaced modifier, or a block of code that isn't closed, and Caminus's endless tide of thought will swallow all of her whole, leaving a shell behind.

Windblade vents once, to steady herself, kneeling over the opened panel. After another, shuddering vent, she raises the hub's interface cable to her helm, and carefully locks it into place while Skyscar and Cymatic look on, their eyes chips of gold in the dark, dim room. Windblade has seen Caminus's main brain module chamber and, in the split second before she completes the interface handshake, it strikes her that this room feels more like -

Even with the artificial throttle on the data flow, Caminus pours through her so completely that Windblade reels back on her heels, her optics flaring with a rush of light. Her b-   ody is so        f _ar_  -               

                                        awa   

y -

Deep in the dream, Caminus loves her. Caminus loves _all_ of them - sleeping, drifting, dreaming, empyrean, a tender affection that draws a sob out of Windblade. They unwound his body -

\- [a willing sacrifice] -

\- until he could no longer speak, until his thoughts grew so distant [in their orbits] that he quietly, quietly -

\- lost consciousness -

\- forgot how to wake up. It's not the stillness of death, but so slow and deep that not even he knows if he could ever come together again. Melancholy and welcome and love (always love) sigh through Windblade and shake her apart. This is gentleness, for a Titan, but it's _still too much,_ and she cannot hold it. For a flicker of a second, she struggles to grasp the impression of wholeness, of a Caminus that isn't comatose and dreaming and slowly fading under an ashen star -

\- but then the current withdraws from her, automatically curbed by her safeguards, and Windblade sags, alone in her own mind, her jittery fingers numb and clumsy and knocking against her helm as she disengages the merge of her own accord. She has to brace herself with an arm for a moment as she collects her thoughts and feels the absence of Caminus's presence like a hole through her spark. So, she thinks - this is what it feels like to miss someone who is right in front of her. She's curled up right against the auxiliary processor, but the brief flicker of glyphs that her merger sparked along the outside of the hub has already dwindled to a hazy smear of mauve. No matter how hard she wills it, the Titan cannot respond from here.

Skyscar and Cymatic allow her the time she needs to gather herself, until she is fit to stand on her own. Then they guide her back out, and home.

The next day she paints her face to honor Caminus for the first time, and recognizes herself in the mirror.

-

Metroplex recognizes her.

At first, Windblade doesn't realize what that means. Metroplex is wounded - a different kind of damage than the slow fade that afflicts Caminus. He dreamed through the long eons on Cybertron intact enough to speak aloud - but then war battered him down again, and again, and again - he left, and returned, and left again, and the damage accumulated until all of his mind turned itself to the task of recuperating. Even at 50% capacity, his brain module keeps up a constant stream of indicators and brilliant glyphs, and as Windblade works alone to decipher them, she marvels at the responsiveness. As he rests in city mode and integrates with the ruins of Iacon, even heavily damaged, Metroplex has experience communicating through other means and does his best to answer her direct queries.

He has experience with _cityspeakers_. Once, Windblade would have said cityspeakers developed on Caminus, for the express purpose of caring for and communing with Caminus as he fell deeper into his dreams, but -

[Wind-voice (voice) (Caminus)(emissary)(loved)] he greets her in a thundering, welcoming cascade of subglyphs, as she drives the interface cable home and merges into his thoughts in a flare of white fire that streams through her optics. Metroplex may be hurting and drained, but he is _here,_ present in a way that Caminus never truly was in those brief moments Windblade communicated with him, and her safeguards - designed and honed with one particular Titan in mind - stagger and barely hold.

They don't hold.

 _We are one,_ they think, and Windblade is so much bigger than her body. Caminus echoes in her spark, even as Metroplex mourns the quiet, ghost-like silence of his resonator beacon. He never stopped reaching out to them, pinging their frequencies once every half-million years, seeking - understanding - but they spun so far away, sunk deep in their love as they ignited the hot spots they carried, and eventually Metroplex was alone.  The corridors of their shared, shuddering body reverberate with emptiness; there are not enough people left in all of Cybertron to fill the void where a thriving home should be - and far, far below, at the furthest edges of [Wind-voice's] thready awareness, Vector Sigma turns and burns, oblivious to millions of years' worth of urgent requests for succor, isolated in the still, deathly-cold reaches of the core. Metroplex alone leaves and returns, leaves and always returns to Cybertron, to [home], and _they're never coming back -_ **[don't leave me alone!]** -

Home will never be home again, without them.

Grief is a lonely, aching thing - their chest pulses with longing for their oldest friend ( _who is here_ ), clawing at the interstices, reaching for the wanderers - [et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem] -

 _They are not alone_.

Metroplex disentangles them with a firm, gentle nudge. He gazes down at Wind-blade's face [voice of the wind, voice on the interstellar wind, speaking from a long way off -] and raises her up, in a way that Caminus has not been aware enough to do for his cityspeakers in an age. [Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale] he murmurs, elegiac, and together they close the space bridge. Windblade stands strong, side by side with Metroplex and though they work in perfect synchronicity, she is not overwritten or overwhelmed by his thoughts.

And…yes. Metroplex has known cityspeakers before. Been visited by them before, so long ago, when the stars were young and comms did not yet span Cybertron - let alone the galaxy - and the other Titans would send emissaries: proud Chela, inquisitive Tempo, beloved Caminus, on and on, and even if they could not leave their duty as cities, they could still interface by willing proxy. Metroplex parts the vast, shattering waves of his thoughts with ease to allow Windblade room to stand, and his focus here at the very heart of him does not burn her out. That Caminus has lost the ability to commune with his cityspeakers without hurting them is something to be mourned.

Windblade slips from the merge with ease, after Metroplex helps her through the transition from the towering immensity of his thoughts back into the familiar patterns of her own. They've made their choice. Always, both cityspeakers and Titans choose to side with creation, to ease the suffering of those around them. To serve.

This is where they need to be.

-

Navitas…

His thoughts whirl and whirl in an unsteady, widening gyre, a centrifuge that spins dangerously fast and low over Windblade's mind. The driving, singular force of his processor threatens to blow her back and suck her in at the same time.

Titans in city mode think solid thoughts and contemplate the millions of infrastructural facilities and systems necessary for a city to not only survive but thrive. Energon and coolant supplies, waste management and treatment, hazardous waste disposal, emergency power generation and transmission, intra-city communications, skyways and bridges and roads -

Well. Navitas has certainly mastered the last. His mastery of the roads and racetracks of Delta is unparalleled, allowing almost complete customization at his people's requests. It's matched only by the desperate, furious calculations that consume the rest of his processor with feverish, obsessive purpose to keep them ahead of the burning sun. While his citizens have neglected and allowed him to crumble away in the dark and dust of this forgotten chamber, Navitas has worn himself down to bare metal and movement, and little else. He races on and on, and they race up above, and meanwhile fourteen of Navitas's main energon tanks are scarred and barren as he sacrifices everything to keep them running. The amount of movement necessary has already riven his processor with cracks.

Shaking, quietly appalled, Windblade gently slips in under Navitas's turning gyre, and makes the changes necessary. He notices her only for a fraction of a second before his mind skips and reiterates his frantic, rasping, chant, and she's forgotten, discarded along with the rest of the detritus (vital functions, space bridge capability, self-repair systems) that has fallen to the bottom of his untended, abandoned mind.

-

Vigilem is not Carcer is not Tempo is not -

 _I served my Liege Maximo_ , he murmurs in her own processor, trickling in past her safeguards in a sinuous curve, _and they thought I could not forge something so simple as a resonance frequency?_

He uses every variant glyph of [forge] that exists, a casual maelstrom of [falsify/copy/hearth/shape/move forward/caminus] that smashes into Windblade, and then he plucks the words that resonated with her most out of her mind to inspect them. To inspect the very essence of _her_ with an eye drawn with light _._ Vigilem knows cityspeakers, too - he played with them often, manipulated them, deceived them, _used_ them, toyed with any who presumed to lie better than his Liege - and it took a hundred of his old cityspeakers working in concert to mislead him. To betray him, and chain him in his own mind. 

He doesn't hate them for it, even now. Their audacity amused him: like protoforms playing at deception. Some of them were his favorites, before, and now their rank hypocrisy fills him with a low thrum of pleasure. Millennia they've spent, repairing him and commanding him and calling him Carcer instead of his true designation, imprisoning him in body and mind and name - at last their lie comes back to undo them, and he is _so very pleased_.

They should never have concealed his name from the world. Now he can destroy them at his leisure.

As Windblade reaches out through his circuits, she trembles under the strain of holding Vigilem's higher functions apart from his frame. She draws herself up, as tall and strong and sound as Metroplex taught her, and reaches out through Vigilem's circuits to command his frame, as she learned from Navitas, and she _holds,_ even as she transforms his body and strikes Cybertron with shattering force. The bulky frame moves clumsily, following Windblade's mental commands faster than the dead Titans can react to, but far slower than it could have if Vigilem were a different Titan. If Vigilem weren't bound with layer after layer of restrictions that threaten to tear as he eddies through Windblade's mind with frightening ease and presses, groping for her weak points. If she didn't have to struggle to master him and keep fighting and safeguard the sanctity of her own mind, all at once - she has to keep fighting -

 _Clumsy,_ he says, right in her ear. He's more than a watchful, narrowed eye, now; for a horrible second, Windblade feels power course through her/their body, and her next punch shoots out with preternatural smoothness as Vigilem moves her own arm in perfect sync. With a jolt and a shuddering gasp, she tears the red web of his mind away from where it wraps around her mental limbs and flails to push him away. He etches a face for himself in the merged space where their minds meet, a patronizing lilt in his voice as he wraps around her again with ease.

Then the weight of him bears down on her - he brushes away Metroplex's scales like they bore him, and suddenly his mind towers over her. Windblade rocks back, so _small_ , and while he leans over her with immense, crushing weight, he reaches out and paints her face for her in sharp, angular lines that carve down her cheeks like knives. _He calls you his Wind-voice,_ Vigilem says, low and mocking, as he coaxes Windblade's hand up - and up - and has her paint in the lines under his own eyes, where Caminus chipped their matching marks off his face. Only the grey, flaking outlines remain on his scraped-up face; with a twist of their clasped hands, Vigilem summons his battle maskplate and visor and his blades. _But you sing like my Caminus, little virus._

 _You sing like_ me _._

She punches him square across the face as their body punches a dead Titan in unison. It's a mistake, Windblade realizes, with spark-stopping horror. The longer they fight, the more processes Vigilem takes over; he knows his own mind far better than she knows it, and each sweeping motion in his battle-dance brings him more fully into his own power. Moving in sync with his limbs no longer feels like cutting through gear grease; it feels glorious, like stretching one's cramped limbs after a small eternity packed away into a too-small cage. He cuts through the hoard effortlessly, and smiles behind his maskplate. A smile just for her.

Then he threatens Metroplex, and she refutes him with such force that they _both_ stagger back and flinch, Vigilem with a gritted snarl. For moment, Windblade wrestles with a god, and pushes him back _into his prison -_

He draws her in close, still smiling, his face white and red and terrifyingly beautiful.

(Every Titan is beautiful.)

Windblade freezes, and looks around, and all she can see are monumental ruins - deep vaults, stacked on top of each other, draped with chains. The labyrinth of Vigilem's mind has in[carcer]ated him for so long, and now it threatens to swallow her whole as he pulls her in deeper, a finger pressed to her mouth to keep her silent -

Distracting her.

"Then you have failed," they tell Elita, their optics as red as a dying sun, and Vigilem's vicious triumph burns through Windblade's chest like molten metal. For a moment, Vigilem presses so close that it _is_ her triumph, too.

She shoots them.

Windblade falls, hits the floor of Vigilem's processor chamber as Elita's flickering blasts carve deep gouges through the brain module before her, and knows nothing more.

-

Starscream enters the dream.

Windblade sits with her legs dangling over the edge of a tower, surveying Iacon's landscape as she has so many times since coming to Cybertron. If she could, she would turn and shove Starscream back out the way he came - the method he used to slip into her mind bypassed both her normal interface ports and the merge port, but she still has safeguard programs at her disposal designed to withstand a titanic will. Mnemosurgeon or no, Starscream has no power here.

[Who is in control?]

Iacon lays devastated, with Metroplex's carcass spread out over the smashed remnants and another city looming in the distance, his smelters working at full capacity to melt down scraps to feed himself again. It is not a quiet ruin. Windblade can't bring herself to look away.

"Well, _this_ is morbid," Starscream complains at once (of course he does), resting his hand on a cocked hip as he clicks his vocalizer at her. Haughty, pretty, petulant Starscream. "I expected something much triter than this out of you." He pauses. "Though you have surprised me before, I'll admit."

If Windblade were the one dreaming, she would dream of Cybertron and Caminus restored; of Metroplex magnificent and whole and smiling at her, of Caminus awake, of Navitas allowed to rest.

She's not dreaming, and Starscream _can't tell_. "You need to leave, Starscream," Windblade tells him, and her voice rings wrong to her ears.

"Of course, you're functionally brain dead, at the moment," Starscream continues. He paces around her to stare at the landscape, his expression an unimpressed grimace before he turns and slants his gaze down toward her. "You can blame Elita for that one. But not to worry, cityspeaker. An…acquaintance of mine just spent some quality time honing her skill at restoring processor function in not one, but five mechs. Practice runs, if you will. You won't even notice a difference when you wake up."

Another pause. "There's just the…small matter of something I need you to do. Oh, not for me, no - Elita has been -"

Typical Starscream. Here in their mind, he emanates stress and exhaustion and the distinct shakiness of a mech running on fumes. He hasn't been eating or sleeping, but he'll be damned before he shows weakness in front of her. He'd rather manipulate her into doing something for him and risk her anger than admit that he needs something so base as help. If Windblade weren't screaming internally, she'd snap at him, and he'd snap back, and somehow they'd wind up knocking everything off his desk as they went for each other's vulnerable wires and ports, seething with charge -

But Windblade is not the virus here, anymore.

From the back of her mind, Vigilem sighs, watching her and Starscream with a mocking smile that barely creases the corners of his paint-smeared mouth. _A little cramped,_ he thinks at her, his voice rippling under Starscream's explanation, _but I have made due with worse cages than this._ He radiates confidence - that Liege Maximo will return for him, to exact vengeance and raise the Titan's body up to its true glory. Brain modules can be rebuilt; it's not a lost art, not when one's [beloved] Prime is as old as Liege Maximo is.

And when he comes, Vigilem-in-Windblade will be waiting, with all the parts of Vigilem that truly matter safely stored in her memories.

 _Shall we subvert him now?_ Vigilem asks aloud, idly; he's not actually asking her opinion on the matter. He shifts beneath the surface of her mind like an undertow.

Windblade reaches up, and Starscream scoffs and offers her a hand with a mocking bow. She flips him with a Titan's strength and slams him against the roof, her optics ablaze with red as she snarls. " _Does this look like my mind?!_ " she demands. Then she tosses him away, easily, catapulting them both out of the dreamspace, out of the reach of Starscream's mnemosurgeon, out of the reach of Vigilem.

"No. You fix me on _my terms_ ," Windblade says, battering Vigilem's compressed personality file out of the way as she strides forward. She hauls Starscream back up onto his feet with wild strength and a cityspeaker's mastery. Her mind throbs, charred and blasted and cracked by the damage done by Elita destroying their processor - but not dead. Not gone _. Not yet_. "And _then_ we'll talk."

**Author's Note:**

> I [bring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_101) you the [finest](http://pern.wikia.com/wiki/The_Music_of_Pern) bibliographies in all the [land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure)...please [feel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so8V5dAli-Q) free to [peruse](http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html) my [references](http://www.homestar.org/bryannan/duino.html)...


End file.
